Dimensioning Electrical Distribution System

LEONI is a major company dedicated to the production of wires, cables and wiring systems. Its products cover a wide range of various domains: mainly automotive industry, but also communication technology, airport transport, medical sector, industrial or household equipments.

Scilab Enterprises has been involved in updating TOODEDIS software, TOOl for Dimensioning Electrical Distribution System, developed and used by LEONI.

Based on Scilab, TOODEDIS is a LEONI business software used to size wires CSA and fuses of wiring harness mainly for automotive. The software takes into account the electrical conductors features, but also the thermal constraints related to the components and their environment. TOODEDIS brings both a response to the weight problem in automotive but also in terms of business performance.

An initial migration work to the Scilab 5 on Windows 7 was first performed in order to intervene at the heart of the delivery that is to say directly in the business code of the software, to improve performance.

The intervention of Scilab Enterprises has divided the simulation time by a factor of two. In parallel, a task of rationalization and stabilization of Scilab code has been performed. This contributes significantly to optimize the reading of code and induce a productivity benefit for LEONI.

Questions to Paul Reveyron, Electrical Architecture Engineer, LEONI Wiring Systems France

Why did you choose the Scilab software over another?

LEONI wanted a reliable, powerful and well-known computational software. Moreover, as the computational software is required at each TOODEDIS install, this software needed to be free to guarantee the deployment of the internal application. Scilab was naturally chosen and thus since 2006.

What results do you expect or can you already quantify of the use of Scilab?

TOODEDIS would not be the same without Scilab. The tool was primarily designed with  Scilab: at first, interfaced with Tcl/Tk, then with Java. However, the heart of Toodedis has very little changed in its structure.

What is the added value of Scilab Enterprises in the realization of your objectivesconsidering that you had already developed this module in-house?

Choosing Scilab Enterprises has been an obvious decision for us when we decided to improve TOODEDIS. New operating systems, differences between 32 and 64 bits were becoming a real obstacle to internal development. Then as we were deploying the tool, the duration of computation time became an important focus of improvement to gain performance.

Indeed, our experience with Scilab Enterprises allowed us to deploy the same tool under different platforms (Windows XP, Windows 7 and also Linux and Mac OS), both on 32 and 64 bits. Furthermore, thanks to their expertise of Scilab software, Scilab Enterprises has been able to optimize our code and divide computation time by two.

Further work will potentially be conducted in the future to optimize again computation time by rethinking Scilab code, both from a business point of view and from a code structure.